In conversation with this year’s Presidential theme “the work of our hands,” this panel examines care work. Religious beliefs and practices are sometimes understood to take care of people who are suffering or in pain while accounts by people suffering or in pain often belie this palliative function of religion. The papers in this session draw on disability theory, feminist care ethics, and histories of sexual pathologization to reconsider what it means to care for people living outside of social norms. Are institutions anti-thetical to care or is it possible to extend care in institutional contexts? These papers examine care work in institutional and domestic contexts as well as the harms done in the name of care.
In the state of Georgia, over 7,000 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are on a waiting list for a Medicaid waiver to fund home and community-based care. Without these funds, many disabled people are at risk of institutionalization and separation from their homes and communities. This paper examines the political advocacy of L’Arche Atlanta in response to this crisis of care. Through analysis of the documentary 6000 Waiting, I argue that L’Arche Atlanta (re)politicizes care by situating the current crisis within the state’s long history of abuse of disabled persons in the name of care and exposing the norm of institutionalization embedded within the Medicaid waiver system, even as it advocates for increased funding within this system. Placing disability theory in conversation with feminist care ethics, this paper challenges common academic representations of L’Arche, care work, and intellectual disability within Christian disability theology.
Throughout the 1930s-40s, Protestants established a network of training sites where seminarians gained supervised experience caring for people in crisis. Drawing on archival material from the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education, this paper traces how chaplaincy programs partnered with prisons and mental hospitals to produce new understandings of sexual morality for the twentieth century. Thinking with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s critique of carceral power, I follow the ACPE’s investments in prisons and in rehabilitating non-normative sexualities (which were often conflated with psychological disability or pathological criminality). I make two critical interventions. First, I counter secularization theories that characterize sexual discourse as shifting sequentially from Christian confession to psychoanalytic methods. Second, by examining care-work’s imbrications with carceral frameworks of rehabilitation, I challenge scholars and practitioners to further disambiguate care-work from state violence. More broadly, this history highlights the entanglements of non-normative sexuality, criminality, and psychological disability in Christian imaginations.
Around Christmastime 1954, Margaret Henshaw, a 15-year-old girl living near Kalamazoo, Michigan, contracted polio. She spent sixteen weeks in the hospital, and upon being released to her home, continued making twice-daily trips to the hospital for therapy, plus a several-week visit to an inpatient rehabilitation facility in Warm Springs, Georgia. Throughout the next year, her mother and primary caregiver, Rena Bestervelt Henshaw, kept a diary documenting each day’s activities, Margaret’s therapy and progress, and her own challenges as mother and caregiver. Through this glimpse at the daily life of a Methodist family caring for a child with a physical disability, in the caregiver’s own voice, this paper considers gendered and unpaid caregiving in the private sphere, conceptions of disability and healing in the 1950s, and the strengths and challenges religious communities provided in times of crisis.
I am a trans, neurodivergent poet and mixed-media artist. I ground my practice in the archive of institutions and institution-building in the 19th century, with a particular focus on the "lunatic asylums" of nineteenth-century Virginia. Understanding institutionality as antithetical to care, my work attempts to unearth a record of people whose resistant strategies of social, sexual, and ecological connection continue to invite us to recognize the world-making possibility within nonnormative modes of feeling and believing. Asylum patients often used sewing and embroidery materials as a means of writing, to tell their stories or advocate for their needs. This artist talk surveys the archive of patient sewing that has inspired me to reperform mad textile practice in my work. Attending to historical detail through the dual practice of embroidery and poetry is a material act of attention, through which I may care for textile archives and the people who made them.